Nun of the above

>> Not of this World is too boring for its own good

by MARK SLUTSKY

Not of this World, the new film by Italian director Giuseppe Piccioni, has picked up a lot of awards in its tour of the film festivals of North America: Best Picture at both the Chicago and Los Angeles fests and the Grand Jury prize at our own World Film Festival. This is all not to mention the film's sweep of the David D. Donatello Awards, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars.

It's easy to see, I suppose, what appealed to the juries' hearts: this is a film with all the earmarks of an Important Movie, a movie about Serious Issues. And indeed, the ideas the film deals with are pretty interesting, and there's obviously an intelligent mind at work here. Too bad Not of this World is such a goddamn bore. While the movie's intentions are respectable, it's just not a very fulfilling or engaging film.

The story is pretty simple. Margherita Buy plays a nun about to take the vows that will bond her to the monastic life forever. One day, while walking in the park, she comes across an abandoned baby. After delivering the baby to safety she begins to investigate the child's identity. Buy comes across a bitter and lonely man (played by Silvio Orlando) who owns a dry-cleaning business and secretly believes himself to be the baby's father. Together they seek out the troubled mother of the child (Carolina Freschi) and forge a bond of their own. The title of the film refers to the three main characters' relationship with the world around them; they are all, in some way, severed from the day-to-day existence of most people, and they must all find their way back.

This is the raw stuff of what could be an interesting movie, don't get me wrong. But lord, how this movie plods along. It just keeps going, one dull scene after the next. Visually, it's as exciting as a soap opera: flat and colourless. The feeling one gets watching Not of this World can only be described as violent dreariness--it's overly-earnest, badly paced and annoying. Annoying because, again, this could have been a good movie. It's well-cast: Buy's face is pale and ghostly and her performance is solid; Orlando makes a sympathetic character out of what could have been a two-dimensional jerk. The situations the characters find themselves in--an unwanted child, a heart condition, an estranged family--have weight, and should have been absorbing.

What Not of this World lacks is a more graceful touch, something that might have made it more entertaining. I'm not suggesting that this should have been light entertainment--it's good to see a filmmaker working with serious, difficult material. But it's possible to make even the heaviest stuff compelling viewing; the Cinéma du Parc's Bergman festival this month should demonstrate that. This film desperately needed either a stronger cinematic sense--some way to make it more of a movie and less of just a depiction of various characters and their relationships--or more of a sense of humour. In the end, Not of this World could have been a very good movie; instead it's just a tedious chore.

Not of this World opens Friday, Aug. 18